Melancholia
by lordfartquad
Summary: Based loosely on the movie Melancholia by Lars Von Trier. Cami O'Connell has been feeling down lately. Well, more than down- downright depressed. But one evening, when feeling overwhelmed and faced with an impossible task, she falls into the arms of a handsome stranger. Will this be a one night stand, or something more? Featuring Daniel, OC from "I Will Always Find You"
1. Chapter 1

Camille O'Connell had known about the existence of supernatural beings ever since she was a little girl. She could sense them like a person could sense an oncoming storm even when there were no clouds in the sky. There was a gut feeling that always gave their presence away, something that tugged at her stomach, telling her to be on alert.

Even though these supernatural beings looked like everyone else, she always knew who they were, or rather _what_ they were. A few different times, she tried to discern if any of her friends could tell by asking subtle questions. "Have you ever noticed that your stomach goes queasy whenever Mr. Washburn is around?" "Do you ever get goosebumps whenever you talk to the girl who's always working at the coffee shop your mom likes to go to?" After every question, she was met with a resounding No. None of her friends seemed to notice what was so plain to her.

She was sure her brother had known about the _others._ She didn't know how he knew, or when he had figured it out, or how he'd come to associate with the witch who hexed him. By now it was a little too late to ask him. But he had known somehow, and probably had the same sense as her.

On her first date with Daniel, she had told him she knew what he was. "Cut the crap," she had said. "I know that you know that I know who you are. _What_ you are. What I don't know, what I can't tell is if you're sizing me up to be your next meal or if you're actually interested in keeping me alive for at least one more date."

"You're much smarter than I ever anticipated, especially considering you're a human," he had said. "Funnily enough, I was pondering the exact conundrum you've presented."

Cami had stiffened in her seat; she had not considered that he had actually been contemplating killing her. But she had covered her discomfort well. "I suggest you keep me alive," she had said.

"Do you have a reasoning beyond the fact that you like living?"

"When was the last time you interacted with any human at all, let alone one who knew what you are? When was the last time you interacted with a human that knew what you are, and you didn't have to compel them? Don't you want to know what it would be like?" She had given him her coyest smile.

Thirty minutes later and they were naked in her apartment.

Now, a year later, the novelty of loving a vampire had lost its alluring, enticing luster. She had once reveled in the knowledge that she, a mere fragile human, had captured the attention of one of the deadliest creatures in existence. When Daniel had taken her to events where she was the only human in attendance, power flooded her body, knowing that she felt entitled to be there amongst the ranks of elite immortals. Pride flowed through her, knowing that anyone else in the room could tear her to shreds with the greatest of ease, but yet no one would dare to touch her. Eyes would turn to her, wonder what she was doing there, and she would draw her shoulders back in pride, clutching Daniel's arm tighter.

As time passed and Daniel's friends got to know her, they had grown comfortable with her, and where she had once felt almost better than them for being allowed to remain human in this flock of vampires, she now felt decidedly inferior. His friends humored her, asking her about her life and her work and anything new going on with her, but at the end of the day, they really had nothing in common.

Daniel neither treated her as a human or otherwise, and she extended the same courtesy to him. He never told her that her species was weaker than his own, never talked about the methods he used to feed himself, and she never asked. They just pretended that such unpleasantries did not exist.

Thus, their life together had become quite domestic, something that Cami had hoped to avoid. She had certainly never expected that dating a vampire would become so…mundane. Every night she would lie down beside Daniel and feel this itch somewhere behind her heart. It took every ounce of restraint in her body not to get up and go, pack a bag in the night, crash on a friend's couch until she found somewhere else to go.

It didn't help that she felt something else was wrong with her, and she didn't know what it was. It was a quiet, unsettling feeling that had nested deep in her stomach. It bothered her each day at work, whenever she sat down to eat her lunch, whenever she had to listen to whatever banality Deb or Ross or Manfredo from the fifth floor had to say, whenever she got called into speak with her boss Jerry. Somehow, whoever she got up to go to work, whenever she was on the bus on the way there, as soon as she got there, all she could think of was Death. Not death in the sense that Daniel was dead, but real Permanently Dead Death.

She thought of all the days that had passed her, and all the days she had before her, and she wished that the days ahead were limited to a very small number. It wasn't that she would actively try to kill herself. It was just that when she thought of her life, when she thought of the tedious, pointless days at work, and the emptiness she felt at home, she wished it would end sooner rather than later.

So often she had nightmares about working at the marketing agency for the rest of her life, feeling miserable, knowing there was no way out. She would wake up gasping, in a cold sweat, clutching her chest.

That was the first indicator for Daniel that something was off. He began to ask her questions, always asking if she was okay. She wanted to scream at him, to tear her hair out, to shout, "Of course I'm not godd*mn okay!" There was this unshakeable sadness inside her, and she wanted so badly to ask for help. But she would always wave him off, say she didn't know what he was talking about, she was fine.

Then the zoning out happened. She would lose chunks of time because she could not pay attention. She felt tired all the time. She couldn't focus on work. Every extra minute she could find was spent trying to nap.

Daniel had once shaken her awake and she had yelled at him. "I'm exhausted, and I barely get enough sleep as it is without you waking me up!" she had said.

He looked at her in that concerned, patronizing way that she hated. "Camille, you sleep all the time. You get, like, twelve hours a night." She wanted to slap him. He leveled his eyes with her. "Now, I know I ask you this all the time, but I am really worried about you. So I want an honest answer, no lies. Promise? Are you okay?"

She had stood up and brushed past him. "I'd _be_ fine if I could just get half a second of sleep around here."

Daniel had sighed, knowing that something was wrong but not knowing what or how to fix it. If Cami wouldn't tell him, there was not much he could do. A few times he considered compelling it out of her, but he knew she would never forgive him for that. He just wanted to help, and he wanted her to be happy, but he didn't know what to do.

After two months of living with the deep-rooted sadness that was plaguing her, Cami began to have hope again. The spark had been planted by an upcoming event, a gala hosted by the marketing company in honor of the company's tenth anniversary. A warmth had flooded Cami's stomach when she had heard of it, coming up at the end of the month. She saw it as a way out of the endless pit of boring domesticity that she had fallen into. It would be an excuse to go shopping for a new dress, to get dolled up, to go out with Daniel, to have a little fun even. And so she set her sights on the gala, hoping beyond hope that it would be just the kind of thing she would need to keep herself going.

The night of the gala, she spent two hours on her hair and makeup. As Daniel zipped her into her dress, he moved the ringlets of her curled hair aside and kissed her neck. "You look so beautiful," he whispered into her skin. "If we didn't have to go right now, I would ravish you." She blushed under the warm touch of his lips against hers. For the first time in months, she did not turn away from his kiss but instead leaned into it, kissed him back, wrapped her hands up in his hair.

She slid the jacket of his tuxedo off his shoulders. Daniel glanced down as it hit the floor, obviously concerned that it would get wrinkled or ruined, but she grabbed his chin, focusing his attention slowly on her. She kissed him deeply. A fiery intensity bubbled up within her, something she hadn't felt in months, and she desperately wanted him. It was overwhelming her, becoming like an insatiable need. "We have time," she whispered breathlessly, kissing down Daniel's neck as she unbuttoned his shirt.

He turned her around roughly, unzipping the back of her gown that he had zipped only moments before. He pulled the silky navy fabric away from her skin, kissing down her collarbone and across her chest. Her head was swimming, intoxicated by his touch and his presence. Cami was breathless, her brain clouded over with desire and wanting. Daniel's hands were everywhere, on her breasts, her waist, dipping below the waistband of her underwear. She wanted this so badly, she had wanted to get this lustful feeling back for so long…

And then the thoughts came back. _We're going to be late for the gala. I have to go to the gala for my job. I hate my job. My job is pointless. Life is pointless._ And suddenly she could breathe all too well, and she could not shut the thoughts out. They clouded all the passion she had felt only milliseconds ago, and she stepped away from Daniel, pulling his hand away from between her legs.

"We should go," she said quietly, trying to mask all the emotions tumbling inside her. She felt guilty for stopping—she had wanted to keep going, but these thoughts… And she felt defective, like she just couldn't be a normal person who was happy to have sex with her partner. Mostly she just felt sad again, and the moment of lust that had washed the sadness away was gone.

"You're really gonna get a guy worked up just to say you have to go?" Daniel said, still standing close to her, his head inclined towards her.

"I thought I'd save the good stuff for after the party," she said with a coy smirk, hoping she sounded convincing. She highly doubted that she would be in the mood after the gala, but she hoped to get Daniel drunk enough so that he wouldn't care anyway.

Daniel seemed to buy it though, as he helped her back into her dress, fixed her hair, and kissed her on the cheek. "I can't wait," he said with a smile. He looked at his watch. "You're right though, we really should get going."

The gala was at a country club about a half hour from their apartment, on the outskirts of New Orleans. Sun was starting to set as they arrived, casting the expansive golf course in a beautiful sherbet-colored glow. "I hope there's a lot of alcohol here," Cami said, mostly to herself.

Daniel smiled as they pulled up to the valet. "Just make sure to pace yourself. Don't get too wasted. But in case you do, I'll be there to hold your hair back for you if you get sick." He put his hand on top of hers and squeezed it and she had the sudden urge to get sick right then and there. She had to remind herself for the twentieth time that day that she loved him, she really did. It was just that she wanted to be left alone sometimes.

On the way into the country club, Daniel took her hand in his, leading her up the steps and into the massive, stuffy building. Cami could hear music pumping from the ballroom, and her stomach turned over. She extracted her hand from Daniel's, pretending that she needed both hands to keep the hem of her dress from dragging on the ground. She would have done anything, given anything just to go back to the car and lie down for a bit, or to just turn and run back home. Her high heels would be killing her by the time she got there, but she would have taken them off and walked home barefoot if she had to.

Daniel looked back at her, noticed her hesitation at the threshold to the country club building. "Are you alright?"

She swallowed the bile collecting in her throat, willed herself to keep moving. She thought to herself, He looks so handsome, don't ruin this for him. You can do this. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm ready." She hoped she sounded convincing.

The ballroom was towards the back of the expansive building, down a series of wide hallways covered in portraits of the club's biggest patrons, or previous owners, or celebrities who had been there. The music that was blaring was overpowering, audible even from outside the building, but was quickly becoming deafening the closer they got to its source. When Daniel took her hand again, she did not pull away this time.

Inside the ballroom, she recognized several of her coworkers talking in small groups scattered across the room, all chatting excitedly, glass of mixed drinks in their hands. Cami felt immediate relief at this; she knew she couldn't get through this night without at least three drinks.

Daniel was saying something to her, but the music was too loud. "What?" she half-shouted, leaning in.

He pressed his lips close to her ear. "Do you want something to drink?"

"Yes," she said, hoping she didn't sound desperate. They walked over to the bar, still hand in hand, and she wondered if the other people in the room were looking at her. Would they see her as a normal person, a successful career girl with a handsome boyfriend? Or did they see her for the fake that she was, plastering on an unconvincing smile, trying to pretend that everything is okay?

"Two Jack and Cokes," Daniel said to the bartender. He handed over his credit card, saying, "Keep the tab open for us."

When the drinks were handed over, Cami downed half of hers in one go. "Whoa there, tiger," Daniel said with a small laugh. "Slow down, I don't want to have to carry you home tonight."

"Just trying to loosen up a little," she said.

He stepped around her so that he was behind her, his hands beginning to massage her shoulders. "I know you've been so stressed lately." He kissed the spot where her jaw met her neck, and she felt the smallest hitch in her stomach, something reminiscent of the old days when she felt that overwhelming lust for him. "Tonight's going to be fun. And if it's not, we can leave."

Cami turned around to face him and let him wrap his arms around her, holding her close. When she looked up at him, his eyes lit up. "I have an idea, we should have a code word."

"A code word?" she said, one eyebrow raising in skepticism.

"Sure," he said. "A code word in case either of us wants to leave early and doesn't want to make it awkward by saying we're leaving. How about…" he thought for a minute, "Aardvark?"

"Aardvark?" she repeated, giggling a little. When she saw he was serious, she said, "Alright. Aardvark it is." She leaned in and kissed him once quickly on the cheek. "You are so thoughtful." Even though she felt that he could smother her sometimes, it was always endearing that he tried so hard to look out for her.

Daniel let go of her, turning to look out onto the dance floor for familiar faces, and Cami took the opportunity to down another large portion of her drink. "Richard is making eyes at us," he said, gesturing with his head towards where Cami's boss was staring at them from across the floor. As soon as she made eye contact with him, he was waving her over to him. The gala was getting crowded now, and it was hard to navigate the busy floor full of dancing bodies.

Slipping her hand into his, she squeezed his fingers. "Is it too early to say aardvark?"

He smiled at her. "Yes, just a little," he said. "It'll be fine. A few minutes of small talk and then we're off the hook."

Richard was a generally unpleasant person. He never seemed to know what was actually going on within the company, he never addressed any complaints that people had, and he always played it off like he knew exactly what was going on at all times when in fact he was totally clueless. But he was the chief executive of merchandising, and her boss, and she had to pull on her fake smile and hope that a conversation with him would be short.

"Richard," she said warmly. She extended her hand for him to shake. His cheeks were red from drinking already, and Cami was slightly relieved by this, hoping that his intoxication would make him more interesting, although she wasn't hopeful.

"Camille," he said in return. "Daniel, how nice to see you both."

"Yes, we're excited to be here," Cami lied easily.

"I have another reason for you to be excited," Richard said, a sly smile crossing his face. He stood aside and gestured towards a tall, slender man standing next to him.

Cami eyed this man from top to bottom, taking in his lanky frame, his crisp black suit, his perfectly coiffed dark blond hair, and his piercing blue eyes. The man gave a knowing smirk as she appraised him, as if he got such a look from people all the time, like he was used to being checked out on the regular.

Her stomach pinched suddenly, and she knew then that she was standing in the presence of another vampire. But something about this man had felt different from the other times she'd sensed a vampire, it was a stronger pull in her gut.

"This is our new associate, Klaus Mikaelson," Richard said, gesturing to the man.

Klaus extended his hand for her to shake. "Pleasure," he said, his voice low and smooth, slightly accented.

Cami felt a shiver rock through her. Something about this vampire was different from others that she'd met; she got the sense that he was stronger than the rest, although she didn't know how she knew that. She also knew that he was stunningly attractive, and her stomach felt increasingly uneasy with this realization compounded by the queasiness caused by sensing a supernatural presence. "Camille O'Connell," she said, trying to keep her composure.

She looked at Richard, hoping he would explain why she was supposed to be so excited about this new coworker. The four of them stood in awkward silence for several seconds before Daniel prompted, "So, Klaus, what do you do?"

Cami studied her boyfriend now, noticing that his posture had stiffened drastically, his shoulders drawn back, his jaw tight. So he could sense it too, she thought, he could see that Klaus was more than just an ordinary vampire.

"Well, that's the funny thing," Richard interrupted, laughing loudly. No one else laughed with him. "Klaus is our new Senior Marketing Consultant."

The color drained away from Cami's face. "But that…Are we…." she tried to control her voice to keep it from shaking, but she was becoming increasingly panicked with every passing millisecond. "Are we having two people in the position now? Because that's…that's my job." Sure, Richard was an awful boss, but surely he wouldn't be firing her right here on the dance floor at the gala by introducing her to her replacement.

Richard put his hand on her shoulder. "Camille, you have been an asset to this company pretty much since we opened our doors. But I think it's time for our horizons to be broadened. And the best way I know how to do that is to give your position to someone else."

Tears started to well up in her eyes, and she thought she might have a panic attack. She couldn't believe she was about to lose her job at the one thing she had looked forward to in months.  
"Becaaauuuussssee…." Richard said, drawing out the word. "Because I'm offering you the position of Art Director."

"You're kidding," Daniel said.

But Cami felt numb inside. She had barely even heard what Richard had just said because her mind kept cycling through the panic and anger she felt at the thought of being fired. Daniel nudged her, watching her reaction. "Babe," he said, smiling, "Art Director. Can you believe it? You got promoted!"

"Promoted?" she mumbled, the words still not registering.

"The position is yours, if you'll have it," Richard said.

Daniel kissed her on the cheek, squeezing her shoulders. "This is great!" he said, trying to fill in the awkward silence as she was still processing everything.

"There is one small catch," Richard said, pausing for Cami to ask what it was. When she didn't, he continued, "We need a new angle and theme for the Beaterrific campaign. By tomorrow morning. Do you think you're up for the task?"

Cami still had a glazed look in her eyes, and everything felt very far away to her, as if this were all happening to someone else. Promotion. Art Director. New campaign. Due by tomorrow. She had taken all these things in, but it was like a puzzle whose pieces didn't match up. She couldn't get any of it to make sense.

"Cami?" Daniel said, nudging her again. She looked at him, and then at her boss, and then at Klaus, all of whom were looking at her expectantly, waiting for her answer.

"Yes," she said after a moment. "I'll give it my best shot."

Richard smiled broadly. "Excellent!" He clapped a hand on Klaus's shoulder. "I'll leave it to Mr. Mikaelson to collect a new campaign slogan and direction from you by the end of the evening." With that, both Richard and Klaus turned on their heels and walked away, leaving Cami reeling.

She put a hand to her forehead. Did she have a fever? Was she hallucinating all this? It didn't seem real.

Daniel touched her shoulder. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Yes, I'm just….it's quite a surprise."

"Yeah! It's awesome," Daniel said, his tone trying to get her to realize that she should be excited too, even though she was still mostly just confused. "I wish he had worded things a little differently though…I thought you were getting fired at first!"

"I did too," Cami said.

"Well, do you have any ideas for the new campaign theme?"

Cami still couldn't clear her head. "I need another drink," she said, and made her way back to the bar.

"A Jack and Coke," she said to the bartender, "And make it strong, please." She was already pretty tipsy from the other drinks she'd had earlier, but she wanted to get really wasted now. Slowly it was sinking in that she had gotten promoted. And then it was sinking in that she only got promoted on the condition that she did the equivalent of a week's worth of work in the matter of a few hours. One the one hand, she wanted to drink to celebrate, and on the other she wanted to drink so that she didn't have to feel the crushing pressure of an unrealistic deadline.

"Make that two," a voice said from behind her.

Cami turned to find herself face to face with her replacement, Klaus Mikaelson. She wished he would go away; he was making this all too real for her and for the moment, she just wanted to pretend that this was normal night, one where she hadn't been promoted and then immediately expected to do a nearly impossible task.

"Mr. Mikaelson, is it?" she said.

"Klaus, please."

"And where are you from? What did you do before Richard got his hooks into you?"

"I've moved around a lot in my life, but mostly like to call this city my home. I've been working as a freelance consultant for firms in the area for a while, decided I should commit to one and give that a shot." Klaus cocked his head to the side, his blue eyes traveling up and to the left, listening to something keenly. "I'm quite fond of this song," he said. "Would you care to dance with me?"

Cami gulped down a big swig of her drink. "Sure," she said in a deep, might-as-well tone.

He smirked. "Don't sound so enthused, please."

As his hand slipped into hers to lead her onto the dance floor, she felt an electric tingle where his skin touched hers. Her stomach flipped over on itself, and she couldn't tell if it was because of her sense of the supernatural, or because she found him so attractive. She suppressed the latter thought, shaking her head as he took her into his arms, his left hand on her waist and his right in her hand.

They danced slowly; she was never a particularly good dancer, and she somehow felt embarrassed about that fact in front of a man who possessed so much grace and effortlessness. She felt his eyes on her, studying her, but she kept her eyes on her feet, focusing on not tripping.

After several moments of silence passed, their eyes met and she felt a shock pass between them. It was the strongest feeling she'd gotten in as long as she could remember. Ever since she'd been feeling down, all of her positive emotions had been dulled, subdued. Her love for Daniel, her excitement for life's daily little pleasures, her excitement for anything really had all taken a backseat to her sadness, her melancholy. So this electricity that she felt between her and Klaus both exhilarated her and frightened her.

"Do you have any ideas for the Beaterrific campaign?" he asked after a moment.

She broke their eye contact, feeling like she could not handle another millisecond of this terrifying connection. "No, nothing brilliant has struck me yet."

"I'm sure something will come to you. It's a shame you don't have too much time."

"Tell me about it," she said. Once again it was dawning on her: she had to come up with an entire campaign concept in less than ten hours.

"I've done some research on the company. I have a few files on it in my car, actually, if you'd like to take a look later. But I can tell you off the top of my head that it's a fairly new company, just started in 2014. Skincare and cosmetics marketed to twentysomethings and people who still like to pretend that they are twentysomethings. The CEO and founder is Bea Breton, the daughter of actress Ronni Breton."

She had known all of this before, but it wasn't giving her any brilliant ideas about a campaign direction. "I'd love to take a look at those files before you leave," she said. At this rate, she was going to have to stay up all night to get this done. But she was secretly hoping that if she could pull all this off, she could go in to the office tomorrow morning, give her pitch, and then Richard would be so pleased with her that he would tell her to go home and get some rest.

"Richard seems to have a lot of confidence in you to give you such a monumental task to accomplish in one night," Klaus pointed out. "You must be quite talented."

"That, or Richard is terribly misguided."

"I don't think so," Klaus said.

She finally looked up, their eyes connecting again.

"I think you can do it."

Her body flooded with warmth at the sound of his kind words. This stranger had faith in her, and she couldn't explain why that meant so much to her.

She felt her face flush, and her skin grew hot, and she noticed now that her hand was sweaty in his. His eyes were watching her intensely, and her head started to swim with wild, impossible thoughts. She wanted to be closer to him, she was drawn to him, she felt this connection to him that made her feel more intensely than she had felt in many months. If she didn't have a boyfriend, she would be trying to figure out how to get him alone so she could kiss him. An image of his lips against hers popped up in her head. Her heart was beating so quickly, and she was sure he could tell.

Withdrawing her hand from his, she stepped back, putting her hand to her head again. "I'm sorry," she said. "I think I need some air."


	2. Chapter 2

Outside, the cool night air did little to clear her head. Cami paced up and down the front throughway, trying to quell the emotions swirling inside her. This stranger, Klaus Mikaelson, had made her feel so strongly, had stirred up more in her than she had known she had in her. She hadn't had such a strong, positive emotion in months.

It was clouding her head now with a million other thoughts. What did this mean for her and Daniel? Daniel, who had been by her side this whole time? Was she cheating on him just by thinking about this Klaus guy? Why couldn't she feel this attracted to Daniel anymore? Maybe she wasn't trying hard enough. She still loved Daniel, still cared about him so much, maybe she just needed to turn her mind off.

"Cami?"

She turned around to find Daniel coming out the front entrance of the country club. "Are you alright?"

"Can we go somewhere?" she said. She was hitching up her determination, knowing that she needed an outlet for all the confusion whirling around within her.

"Do you want to go home?" Daniel was studying her face, looking worried.

"No, I just want to be alone with you for a minute," she said. And before he could say anything in return, she slipped her hand into his and was leading him back into the country club. She took him down a hall, away from the ballroom, looking for anywhere private.

"Are you okay? Do you want to talk?" Daniel was saying, but she ignored him.

Finally, she came upon a women's restroom and pulled him in quickly before he could object. Cami shut the door behind them, turning the lock until it clicked.

"Cami, what's going on?" Daniel's brow was furrowed, studying her carefully.

Pushing him back against the door, she threw herself at him, kissing him roughly. At first, he stood frozen, not kissing her back, his palms turned up in a gesture of confusion. Keeping her lips pressed firmly to his, she took his hands and placed them around her waist. When she kissed down his neck, he finally responded, turning her so that she was now pinned against the locked door, and kissing her on the lips just as passionately as she had kissed him.

"Cami, Cami, babe," he said, smiling in spite of himself as her hand rubbed over the front of his pants. "Are you alright? How much have you had to drink?"

"Just let me kiss you," she said, pressing her lips breathily along his neck. She could see that he wanted to keep asking her if she was sure she was alright, so she kissed him even harder to shut him up. Beginning to lose herself in the moment, she felt her heart racing, her skin beginning to flush, relishing the warm tingling of his lips against hers. _It was working,_ she thought. All her racing thoughts, all the confusion that Klaus Mikaelson had stirred up within her were beginning to settle and die away.

As she kissed Daniel, she tried to convey so many things with her kisses: _I'm okay. We're okay. It's going to be alright, we'll get through this, whatever this is._ She held her to him, feeling closer to him emotionally than she had in a long time.

She slid his jacket off his shoulders and tossed it to the bathroom floor. Undoing the buttons of his shirt, she smiled up at him, hungry to see more of his skin. He hiked up the skirt of her dress, pulling her panties down until they caught around her ankles. She kicked them off, leaving them beside Daniel's jacket, and then his shirt, which she had just finished removing.

Roughly picking her up, Daniel moved her over to the bathroom counter, setting her down as he kissed down her neck and along her collarbone. As he kissed lower, he sank to his knees, pressing his lips along the tops of her thighs until she tilted her hips up for him. The ache between her legs was stronger than it had been in a very long time, and she was desperate now, her head thrown back in anticipation.

It was euphoric when Daniel finally pressed his mouth against her, and she smiled as she moaned, wrapping her fingers up in his black hair to hold him closer. Her mind, for once, was blissfully blank, and she felt herself getting lost in the pleasure. For a second, she wondered if there was a way she could make this last forever, if she could somehow make the pleasure permanent, if only to keep her mind this empty.

And then someone's face flashed before her closed eyes. Klaus Mikaelson. She didn't want to be thinking about him now, she wanted to be thinking about her amazing, supportive boyfriend who was currently giving her exquisite pleasure. But still Klaus's face appeared for a split second whenever she closed her eyes.

It wasn't even that she was thinking about him because he was so attractive. It's just that his image kept coming back because she had something to remember in relation to him. What was it? Her brain kept searching and searching for the reason as to why she would be thinking about him at a time like this.

Finally, it clicked. She had to come up with the theme for the Beaterrific campaign. And being in the bathroom now with her boyfriend on his knees for her was taking away from her precious time to work on that. And suddenly everything stopped for her— the passion, the pleasure, her empty mind. It all flooded back just as suddenly as it had been pushed aside, and she remembered it all: her impossible task, her sh*t job, her crushing unhappiness. And as it came back in, it felt like all of it was hitting her twice as hard, knocking the wind out of her.

"Daniel? Daniel," she said softly. "Babe, stop."

He looked up at her, taking in her pained expression. He stood up, pulling her skirt back into place. "Cami, please tell me what's wrong," he said quietly. "Please, I can try to help."

He sounded so sad that her eyes started to well with tears. She wanted so badly to tell him what was going on with her, all the terrible thoughts that constantly buzzed around her head, threatening to drown her once and for all. But every time she opened her mouth to start explaining, nothing came out, as if there had been an Off switch on her vocal cords.

She faked a smile for him. "I'm just tired," she said, trying to sound convincing.

"Cami," he said, his tone warning. He knew she was lying.

"I'm tired. Can we go back to the party?" Cami hopped off the counter, unlocking the door to the bathroom and pulling it open. She left Daniel in there, hurriedly trying to re-button his shirt so he could follow her.

"Do you want to go home?" he called after her, but she was already down the hallway, on her way back to the ballroom.

Her heart was hammering loudly in her chest now, and her whole body felt like it was vibrating. Try as she might, she couldn't stop her hands from shaking. She tried to breathe, tried to shut down her racing thoughts so that she could try to calm down, but everything was swelling like a balloon inside her.

Back in the ballroom, she saw Klaus across the room. His eyes locked on her, and he started towards her, a question poised on his lips. She didn't know what he was going to say— _Have you thought about the campaign? Any ideas so far? How's the brainstorming going? Are you alright?—_ but she knew she couldn't handle any of those questions. Before he could take another step towards her, she was turning on her heels and practically running from the room.

Willing herself to keep her pace controlled at a fast walk, she felt the tears start to fall. She made sure to take a roundabout route out of the country club building in order to avoid anyone that might be walking by. She especially didn't want to see Daniel. She needed to be alone more than anything else.

As soon as she found an exit door she burst into the night air and kicked her shoes off, picking them up as she started to run across a small bit of pavement, and then the smooth grass of the golf course. Tears streamed down her face, ruining her makeup, but she didn't care, and she couldn't stop their flow. Cami needed to keep running, needed to keep crying, needed a release for all these intense emotions bottled up inside her.

She just felt so overwhelmed with everything, with the deadline on which her promotion rested in the balance, with her disconnection with Daniel, with the spark lit within her by a single minute spent with Klaus Mikaelson. And once the tears started to fall, she couldn't get them to stop.

Cami ran and ran and ran, her aching feet cooled by the dewy touch of the smooth grass on the golf course. The night air flowed over her skin, brushing the hair out of her face, starting to dry her tears into tight track marks on her cheeks.

A stitch in her side finally made her slow down, and then stop completely. She bent over, clutching her side, trying to get a breath in her, but no matter how much air she gulped, she felt she couldn't breathe.

Dropping to her knees in the grass, Cami sobbed in earnest now, letting go of all her inhibitions and letting all her emotions out. She was far enough away from the party that no one would hear her, and it was dark enough now that no one would really see her unless they knew where to look. She cried because she didn't know how to meet her deadline, because she didn't think she could do it, and now she wouldn't get a promotion and she couldn't have her old job back either because now there was a replacement for her. She cried because she wished that she still felt connected to Daniel, she wished that she still loved him like she used to, but she knew that they had grown distant. She cried because she didn't think that there was any way to salvage their relationship. And she cried because all these things scared her beyond belief.

After several minutes, her sobs dissipated to a quiet weeping. Soon, the tears stopped altogether, and Cami sat in the grass with an eerie sense of calm settling over her. She felt completely numb now, almost hollowed out, like her emotions had been a tangible entity that she had expelled through her tears, and now that they were all out, she was empty. She had experienced the emptiness like this before, and it had scared her, but now she felt almost exhilarated. She felt free.

She stood and dusted off the bottom of her dress, picking up her shoes. Her mind was empty now, and all she could think or feel were the physical sensations around her— the cool dampness of the grass beneath her bare feet, the light breeze that raised goosebumps on her skin.

On the back side of the tenth hole, she sat in the grass, and then laid on her back. It was almost completely dark out now, and she watched the white glow of the moon illuminating the navy sky.

Her mind was clear now, and she would have given anything to keep it that way forever. Whenever a troubling thought crept in, she just thought, _I'm hiding away. No one can find me here. I have no responsibilities. Right now I don't owe anything to anyone._ And for a while this worked.

The stars came out, shimmering in the night sky, and she began to count them. She thought of how she used to take astronomy classes through the park district when she was in elementary school, and she tried to remember any of the constellations she might recognize. She could see Orion and Cassiopeia, but she didn't recognize anything else.

Studying the stars that continued to emerge, she decided she would make her own constellations. A tickling voice in the back of her head tried to remind her that this was a waste of time, that she was just giving herself less time to work on the Beaterrific campaign. And then she would think to herself that coming up with new constellations was more important, and than thousands of years from now, people would look up at the night sky and be able to recognize the ones she was coming up with right now.

Raising her arm, she pointed her finger at an arrangement of stars, tracing an imaginary outline around them in the rough shape of a duck, or at least what she thought was a duck. "I will call this new constellation, 'Gerald,'" she said to herself.

"Gerald, huh?" a voice said from behind her.

Cami unsteadily tried to leap to her feet. The alcohol was hitting her in earnest now, and she was pretty moderately drunk. A hand caught her forearm, steadying her. When she looked up, she found herself face to face with Klaus Mikaelson.


	3. Chapter 3

"So what sort of creature is this new constellation, Gerald?" Klaus said.

"He…he's a duck," she said, trying to make her voice sound strong and confident, knowing that it was coming out hoarse and slurred.

Reaching into a pocket in his jacket, Klaus extracted a handkerchief and handed it to her. "You've got a little…" he trailed, gesturing on his own face to indicate that she had tear-stained mascara trails down her cheeks. She accepted it, dapping at her face, feeling guilty that she was creating black stains on the clean white fabric.

"Thank you," she said.

"So what is Gerald's backstory?" Klaus said.

"What do you mean?" Cami said, handing the handkerchief back to him. When he took it back, their fingers brushed briefly, and it sent a shock through her body. In spite of herself, she took a tiny step closer to him. It was intoxicating to be in his presence, to hear the low, smooth sound of his voice so close to her, to have his blue eyes studying her carefully.

"Well, all good constellations have a backstory. Cassiopeia, for example," he said, pointing to the sky where the constellation was, "was a queen who so loudly boasted of her own beauty and the beauty of her daughter Andromeda, that she claimed they were both more beautiful that the sea nymphs. As punishment for her vanity, she was forced to be placed in the sky, and her daughter was offered as prey to the sea monster Cetus." Klaus's finger traced along the constellation Andromeda.

Cami watched him with fascination, hanging on to his every word. With every passing second, she felt something swell within her, this desperate wanting for him.

The alcohol was fogging her head, and her cathartic crying session had left room for only reckless thoughts and impulsive actions. She watched him closely, studying the curve of his lips, the way his eyes were lighting up in the darkness as he spoke about the stars. She found herself thinking that she had not felt such a strong, instantaneous attraction to someone in a long time, perhaps ever. In that moment, she would have done anything to be able to kiss him.

Now he was looking at her too. Her vision was a little fuzzy with the alcohol, and it was quite hard to see him in the dark, but she could feel a static between them that went beyond her physical attraction to him. She watched him study her, and knew that he with his heightened vampire senses, he could see her pretty well in the dark, and she wondered if he thought she was pretty. She was sure her makeup was still smeared on her face, despite his generous sacrifice of his handkerchief.

His eyes turned back to the sky, searching for where Cami's imaginary constellation was. "So what is Gerald's story?" Klaus said again. He turned his eyes towards her, taking a step closer to her.

A surge of electricity rocked through her. Her heartbeat quickened embarrassingly, and she was sure he could hear it. Her head emptied itself of all thoughts except for him. _Klaus. Klaus Mikaelson. I need him, I need him, I need him._ Alcohol and the heady static of attraction was making her feel dizzy and euphoric.

"Cami, are you—"

Suddenly Cami was throwing herself at him with surprising speed and ferocity. She did not think she could handle one more person asking if she was alright, so she crushed her lips against his to shut him up. Her arms flung themselves around his neck as she stood on her tiptoes, smashing her mouth to his. She could taste that alcohol on him, hoped that they had both had enough to drink that neither of them would question or try to stop the other.

She kissed him for a long minute while he stayed totally frozen in shock, his hands at his sides, his eyes open. She was afraid to pull back, to stop because she was scared that they may not start again. She just hoped that he too could feel the electricity that was making her heart hammer beneath her breastbone, and that that would be enough to keep going.

His hands were on her shoulders, pulling her away from him slightly, until she had no choice but to disconnect the kiss and look at him. "Are you alright?"

Cami's jaw clenched. She turned broke free from him, started to stomp away angrily, thinking about going back into the party and demanding that Daniel should take her home right then. But she had gotten this far, and now she had tunnel vision. She fully intended to get what she wanted, and what she wanted right now was Klaus Mikaelson.

"I swear to god, if one more person asks me that…" she said, spinning back around. Her determination was kicking into overdrive, making her adrenaline flow freely, and she felt bolder than she ever had before. A wild sense of abandon was growing within her, making her feel expansive, never-ending, completely devoid of any inhibition or burden.

Her palms made contact squarely with his chest, shoving him hard. It was so quick, so unexpected, that she knocked him to the ground, just like she had wanted. Power was making her head swim, knowing that she had just knocked this vampire off his feet, taking him by surprise.

Before he could get up, she climbed on top of him, straddling his lap, crashing her mouth back onto his. This time he kissed back, albeit hesitantly. She could tell he was nervous about this, and an unspoken question hung between them in the air: _What about Daniel?_ And so she kissed Klaus harder, to forget that Daniel existed, to convince Klaus just how badly she needed this.

After a long moment, she felt him move beneath her, felt his hands wrap around her waist. And then she felt him begin to kiss her back in earnest, his reservations quieted now by the intense chemistry flowing between them.

As soon as she felt him starting to kiss her back, she eased off. She had been practically smashing her face to his, trying to convince him that this was okay, that this was what they both needed, but now she pulled back a little, started to kiss him slowly. His mouth tasted like whiskey, and she could smell his cologne, woodsy and leathery. Cami relished the taste of him, the soft feeling of his lips against hers, the scratchiness of his stubble against her chin.

Experimentally, she ran her tongue along his upper lip, her hands moving from around his neck up into his hair. His breathing hitched slightly, and she smiled against his lips, pushing him back so he was fully lying down with her on top of him. She got a head rush from all the power, from being in complete control for once, and she smiled again as she moved one of her hands to his throat.

She squeezed lightly, turning his head so that she could kiss down the length of his neck. Shimmying backwards a little, she reached down to the buckle of his pants, undoing it and his fly. "Wait," he said breathily. "Are you sure we should…"

Cami reached down the waistband of his boxers, taking his already-stiff length into her hand. "Don't stop me," she said in a stern tone. Then, realizing how forceful that sounded, she revised, "Please let me keep going," leaving it to him to give his consent.

It was pretty hard for him to say no as she stroked his length. Whatever reservations he had about this fell away as he kissed her deeply, his fingers closing up in her hair and pulling slightly. He caught her bottom lip between his teeth and pulled gently, eliciting a moan from her. That was all the convincing it took for him. "Don't stop, please," he said. She did as she was told.

Hiking her skirt up around her hips, she realized that she had left her underwear in the bathroom from her tryst with Daniel. She grinded her hips down onto him, kissing him hard as her hips started to move back and forth instinctively.

Klaus's hands extracted themselves from her hair to push his trousers and boxers down over his hips. And then he pulled her hips down onto him, and he was filling her with this intense, euphoric pleasure. Her head felt so fuzzy, so pleasantly empty for once, and all she could do was focus on him, on their connection.

Rocking her hips up and down, she pressed her mouth to his roughly, her hands clenching in his hair. The friction was already building inside her, causing her to cry out. A warmth was collecting between her legs, and she would do anything to keep it growing.

She moved faster, harder above him, sitting up so that she was riding him, her head swimming with immense pleasure. In her periphery she could hear his moans, but she was so focused on her own pleasure that it didn't register to her.

It was getting so close for her, so painfully close, and she couldn't stop. She had hoped to draw this out a little longer, to keep the blissful emptiness in her head for a little longer, but she couldn't hold off anymore. Cami let out a loud cry as she came, throwing her head back as she rode out her pleasure.

Her mind was flooded with an intense, delicious emptiness. She hardly even noticed when Klaus flipped her underneath him, rocking into her until he finished a few seconds later. As he rolled off her, she just lay there in the grass on the golf course, eyes closed as she savored the buzzing high rolling through her body.

It didn't take long for reality to set back in. Thoughts trickled in slowly, individually so that she felt the pain of all of them. _You're so stupid. Why did you do this? What about Daniel? This didn't solve anything. You're still broken, and now you've ruined your relationship._

Klaus was lying beside her as she sat up, turning her back to him. She looked at him for a moment, his eyes still closed with bliss, his chest heaving as he began to catch his breath. Turning away from him, she stared out into the darkness, feeling her whole world come crashing in around her. _You should have known better, you should have known better, you should have known better. You should have known that this wouldn't solve anything, that it would make things worse._ And yet she couldn't have stopped herself from leaping at the opportunity for a momentary reprieve from the pain she constantly felt. She had gotten that, but it hurt all the more when her problems had come back.

Tears welled in her eyes, and she started to shake. She could feel a panic attack coming on, looming like a hurricane just offshore.

He sat up behind her, draping his arm over her shoulder and across her chest, pulling gently so that she would lean back into him. But she resisted, resting her hand on his wrist lightly before disentangling herself.

Standing quickly, she straightened her skirt. "I have to go," she mumbled.

"Wait!" he called. She was already a few steps away from him but she stopped, not turning around, but giving him a chance to say what he wanted to say. "I know…I know you're with Daniel. But if things don't work out, maybe I could see you again?"

Cami didn't dare turn around because if she did, she knew she would lose her resolve. She knew that if she looked at him, if she saw his shadowed expression, she would run back to him and kiss him and they would start all over. "I think that's a very bad idea," she almost whispered, but she knew he could hear her.

Before he could say anything else, she was walking back towards the country club, leaving her shoes behind.


	4. Chapter 4

Once back inside the country club, she hurried to the bathroom, quickly studying her face in the mirror. She hurriedly wet some paper towels, fixing the smudges in her makeup, trying to do this as quickly as possible because she simply couldn't stand to look at herself. The tile of the floor was cold underneath her bare feet, and she was still shaking from her encounter with Klaus. Before she could spend too much time thinking about it, she hurried out of the bathroom and down the hall into the ballroom.

The first thing she did once she was inside was to head straight from the bar and down two drinks in as many gulps. She was still moderately drunk, but she needed to be blacked out, she needed to be completely unconscious as soon as possible.

Daniel was across the room, chatting excitedly with Cathy from IT. Cami practically ran over to him, standing in front of Cathy from IT, not caring that she was being incredibly rude. "Aardvark," Cami said, invoking their codeword that meant one of them wanted to leave.

"Uh, okay," Daniel said, looking at her concernedly. He looked her up and down, taking in her mussed hair, his eyes widening when he saw she wasn't wearing any shoes.

"Now," she said impatiently, angrily. She turned on her heel and started walking away, not waiting to see if Daniel was following her. She couldn't stand to look at him, she felt so ashamed. She just needed to get out of here, the sooner the better, or she feared she would start crying or hyperventilating or screaming.

Daniel looked apologetically at Cathy from IT. "I'm sorry," he said, "Cami's not…she's not feeling well."

Cami was about to make a clean getaway when her boss Richard stopped her on the way out. "Camille, have you thought any more about the direction for the Beaterrific campaign?"

Something was cracking inside her and she felt like exploding. All this anger, this pain, this stress and anxiety was bubbling over, ready to erupt at any minute. "Yes, Richard," she said, giving him a patronizing smile, "I have thought about it."

"And?"

"And…And. And I think you're the worst boss I've ever had. I think this promotion is a crock of sh*t scheme to get me to do more work for only a marginal pay raise. I think you're trying to soothe your guilty conscience for firing twelve people this past year by promoting some of your quote unquote favorites. And frankly, I don't want to be your favorite. I don't want to be your anything, I don't want to be your Art Director, I don't want to be your employee in any capacity. You told me about the position by making me think that I was getting fired, who does that?!"

Daniel came up behind her, putting his hand on her shoulder. She realized then that she had been shouting. She thought of all the difficulty she had been having in the past few months at work, how she no longer felt like she was valuable there, how she dreaded getting out of bed and going every morning. And she knew that she meant it when she had said she didn't want to work there, and she didn't want the new position. She wanted something that would fulfill her, make her excited to be there, make her feel important.

"What's going on here?" Daniel said.

Richard laughed nervously. "I'm not sure," he said. "I think Camille might have had one too many to drink. I'll tell you what, take the upcoming week off to have some time to yourself, recharge, get your head on straight. In the meantime, I'll have Klaus start work on the campaign, and he'll fill you in when you come back next Monday."

Klaus had come up beside them, keeping his eyes firmly cast to the floor. "I'll be in touch," he said in her general direction, still not looking at her.

"No, Richard, you're not listening to me. I'm not going to take the week off, I _no longer work for you,"_ she said, enunciating the last five words clearly and loudly.

"Cami, come on, let's go. Let's go home," Daniel said, his hands on her shoulders, guiding her towards the door. She tried to fight, to hold back, to keep shouting at Richard, but Daniel moved her along.

"I am _not_ coming back to work!" she shouted at Richard as Daniel continued to usher her out of the ballroom. "And I don't appreciate being manhandled by the likes of you," she spat at Daniel.

"What is wrong with you?!" Daniel shouted back. "Don't make me carry you kicking and screaming out of here, because I will do it."

"Why is no one listening to me? Is this what I have to do to be heard? To scream and throw a fit until someone takes notice that I'm unhappy?"

Daniel stopped walking, his hands still on her shoulders, turning her to face him. His face was soft now, but she could see the wild fear in his eyes. Suddenly he pulled her into his arms, holding her tight for a second. She felt herself calming down, the desperate urge to scream ebbing.

"What was that for?" she asked when he pulled away.

"That's the first time, finally, that you admitted you're unhappy."

They didn't say anything for a few moments, just stood looking at each other. Daniel's eyes were brimming with tears, but Cami was drunk enough that she could keep her feelings behind the floodgates.

"Let's go home," Daniel said softly.

When the car was brought around, she got in the back seat. "I'm just going to lie down for a little bit," she slurred. She curled up across the seat and fell asleep.

Once back at their apartment, she woke up to find herself still in her gown, lying next to Daniel in bed. She got up slowly, testing to see if he was awake. Despite having supernatural hearing, he was quite a heavy sleeper, and it was usually rather easy to sneak out of bed to go watch TV in the living room if she couldn't sleep.

Tonight instead of watching TV, she removed her dress, standing in the darkness in only her bra. Her underwear, she realized, were still on the bathroom floor at the country club. The memories from earlier in the night were flooding back to her. Getting belligerently drunk, making a scene in the ballroom. The sex with Klaus. All the shame, the embarrassment, the guilt, the overwhelming despair she felt were so horrendously painful that she blocked them out.

She got into a cold shower, sitting at the bottom of the tub as the water poured over her, raising goosebumps on her skin. The kind of emptiness that was settling inside her was the unpleasant kind, the kind where she would have given anything to start feeling again. It was the numbness that was now making her feel inhuman, robotic. _This is why no one can love you,_ she thought. _You don't actually have any real feelings, you're not a real person._

The floodgates opened then, and she sobbed as quietly as she could, her tears mixing with the water from the shower falling all around her. After several minutes, she collected herself. The shower had sobered her up a little bit, and she needed sleep, she was just so exhausted. The sleep couldn't hurt either, she thought, it would be nice to shut her brain off for a little while.

A tiny ember of happiness sparked within her when she realized she no longer had a deadline resting on her shoulders. In fact, she didn't have to go to work on Monday, or at all that week. Or ever again, she thought. She had told Richard that she quit. And she had meant it.

Cami turned off the shower, wrapping herself in the warmth of a towel. Her skin welcomed any bit of warmth it could get; she had probably been in that cold shower for more than twenty minutes.

Getting dressed in the dark, she stumbled over to the bed, still half drunk. She got beneath the covers beside Daniel, who was thankfully still fast asleep. Instinctively she reached out to touch his face, to brush the shaggy hair back from his forehead, but she held back. It was all starting to sink in, the gravity of what she had done. She was so desperate to feel something that she had cheated on him. And he had no idea.

She had to tell him. Her compulsion was to shake him awake, to tell him right then, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.

She sat up in bed, crawled across the bedspread so that she was sitting at the foot of the bed facing him. She sat cross-legged, watching him sleep, feeling shame and remorse seep in and fill every molecule within her. She had _cheated._ She had quit her job. She had ruined the only two semi-good and consistent things she had in her life. She wondered if it would be her destiny to ruin everything she touched.

Quietly, she got up from the bed and paced around the room. She could not fathom possibly sleeping next to him now as if nothing were wrong, as if she hadn't done this terrible, unforgivable thing.

After a few minutes of pacing, she sat down on the carpet of the floor, right where the floor of the apartment was slightly warped and concave. He was so blissfully unaware that anything was wrong, so innocent and free. She would have given anything to feel that way too.

 _I'm the worst person in the world,_ she thought. _A despicable excuse for a human. I have ruined everything._

Another thought, more of an abstract impulse entered her head. _I can't stay here._ She tried to push the thought away, but the more she tried to block it out, the more it fought and grew stronger.

Her brain raced three thoughts ahead of itself, already planning how she would do it. She had her whole life here, all her things, all the things that were hers and Daniel's together. But if she was going to run away, she would have to leave almost all of it behind. She hadn't even decided to run away yet, or where she would go, or how she would get a new job, and already her brain was three steps ahead, planning the whole thing as if it were really going to happen.

Her mind kept arguing with itself. _I can't possibly do this— I just have to tell him the truth and hope that he'll forgive me. You have to run away, there's no other choice. No I can't, where will I go? Anywhere but here. I can't go. Well, you can't stay either._

The walls were closing in on her, and she felt as if she were being suffocated. Now that she had thought of running away, she could not get the idea out of her head. _I can't leave, I can't leave, I can't leave,_ she tried to convince herself. _I have to stay and try to work through this._

Yet in spite of these mantras that she was repeating over and over in her mind, she got to her feet and started packing.

She grabbed some clothes, her toiletries, anything else essential that she could think of, her phone, her computer. She was almost out the door when she stopped, setting her bag down and walking into the kitchen to get a piece of scrap paper and a pen.

"I'm sorry. I did something bad, and now I have to go. I can't explain. I just need help, and I need to be alone. I'm so sorry. I love you."

Cami left her note on the pillow beside Daniel. Taking one last look around the apartment, she hitched her duffel onto her shoulder and stepped out the door.

Her body went into autopilot mode, and her brain was shut off. She didn't even realize what address she had given to the taxi driver until she was standing on her sister's doorstep, waiting to be let in at three-fifteen in the morning.


	5. Chapter 5

"Where are you? Call me ASAP!"

Cami had to give it to him, Daniel was smart. He knew that she wouldn't pick up the phone if he had called.

She was resolved to have the inevitable conversation with him that evening, but he didn't know that yet, and she wasn't ready to tell him. "All you need to know is that I'm safe. I'm coming over tonight at eight. Please don't worry about me," she texted him back.

"CAMILLE, I AM WORRIED. YOU LEFT ME A VERY CRYPTIC AND CONCERNING NOTE AND FLED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. PLEASE TALK TO ME," he responded in all caps.

She decided she wouldn't respond. She had nothing more to say that couldn't be said later on that night when she would tell him the truth. In the meantime, she could use the day to try to settle in to her sister's house, get some sleep, try not to think about things too much.

When her sister had opened the door for her six hours earlier, Cami had fallen into her arms, crying. Margaret O'Connell was surprised to see her sister, obviously in extreme emotional distress, standing on her stoop at three in the morning, but she let her in nevertheless. Cami had confessed everything to her, the crushing sadness she felt at all times, all the events from that night including her tryst with Klaus and her tantrum at the party in which she quit.

And Margaret had just sat there and listened like a good older sister, holding Cami as she cried, stroking her hair, trying to be soothing and comforting.

After Cami had cried for a while, her sister made her look at her. "Cami, you did a bad thing. But you are not a bad person, do you understand?"

Cami blinked, wiping tears away. "I'm not sure."

"Well I'm sure enough for the both of us. I think it's important that you tell Daniel sooner rather than later. That way it's not eating away at you. While you're there telling him, you can get the rest of your things, and then you can stay with me for as long as you need. Okay?"

Now Cami was sleeping on the couch. Margaret hoped that by the time her sister woke up, Cami would be sober; she had still been rather drunk when she'd showed up.

Every time Margaret went into the living room to check on her sister, Cami was still asleep. She thought surely Cami would wake up around noon, and when she didn't, then certainly she would be awake by two, and when she wasn't, then Margaret hoped by four. At seven, she became concerned. She put her hand on her sister's shoulder, shaking her awake.

"Cami? Camille?" she said quietly.

Cami's eyes fluttered open, and Margaret had to stifle as gasp. Her sister looked terrible, her eyes bloodshot, dark purple hues ringing them, her expression pained and frightened.

"Are you hungry?" Margaret said. "It's almost time to go."

Cami shook her head. "No, no, I don't think I could eat," she said as she sat up, clutching her stomach. "In fact, I might just be sick." She bolted up from the couch and made a mad dash for the bathroom, just barely getting the toilet seat up before expelling the contents of her stomach. After a minute, she heard her sister come in, felt her hair being pulled away from her face as her sister knelt beside her. Margaret patted her back, whispering soothingly to her.

When Cami was done, she sat back on her heels on the bathroom floor, wiping her mouth. Margaret continued rubbing her back, arranging her hair out of her face. "Do you want me to take you?" Margaret said.

All Cami could do was nod. "Take a minute, then," her sister said. "We'll go soon."

Cami wanted to ask, Wouldn't they be early then? But she knew it was better to get this over with, to be done, to have this weight lifted off her shoulders so that she could hopefully move on.

It only took about fifteen minutes to get from Margaret's house to her apartment. Or, more accurately, her apartment that within the hour would be no longer hers. Cami had to keep reminding herself that she would not live here anymore. Even if, after she told him the truth, Daniel still begged her to stay, she knew she would be leaving it forever.

The drive was made in silence. Cami tried to go over a script in her head, tried to rehearse what she would say, but nothing was coming to her. It was all just a jumble of anxious, racing thoughts that in every imagined scenario that she could think of, ended with both her and Daniel in hysterical tears. It was everything she could do not to throw herself from the car, to scream and fight and run away. But she had to stay, and she had to do this. The secret of what she'd done was eclipsing any fear she had about confessing it.

They pulled up in front of the apartment building. Margaret said, "I'll be waiting right here." She looked Cami once over before giving her a quick hug. "Good luck, sister."

On autopilot, Cami got out of the car, letting herself into the complex and walking up to the third floor. It was something she had done a thousand times, something that seemed so routine, and despite knowing full well that this would be the last time she ever made this journey, it felt just the same as always. She felt dissociated with herself, like her soul and her consciousness were somewhere far away, or that her brain and rational thinking had shut off, leaving her with a still-walking, hollow body.

The key turned in the lock to the apartment door as she let herself in. She quickly realized that Daniel was not there yet. She took the opportunity to quickly start packing her things. Starting in the bedroom, she began taking all her clothes out of the closet, stuffing them into a large duffel haphazardly. Next, she moved on to the kitchen, quickly realizing there wasn't much to take. Her plates, her cookware, her bowls, these things could all be replaced with new ones, all she wanted was her favorite mug. She took it, the one with the blue elephant and gold edging, down from the cupboard and carefully wrapped it in a dirty sweater, placing it in the suitcase.

Cami heard a key go into the lock and fiddle with it before the bearer of the key realized that the lock was already open. The key was withdrawn from the lock, and the bearer turned the doorknob, opening the door and stepping into the apartment.

Daniel stood in the threshold, and Cami froze, hand poised to take a pair of novelty salt and pepper shakers down from the cupboard. For a long moment, they stared at each other, and Cami's heart was seized with fear. And then Daniel was rushing toward her, taking her into his arms and holding her so tightly that she couldn't breathe. When he pulled back, she saw that tears had sprung to his eyes, his mouth in a pained, broken line.

"I was so worried," he said quietly. "What's wrong? What did you do? Where did you go?"

Cami couldn't answer him. All the words she wanted— no, she needed to say were jumbled up within her, and they all wanted to come out at once. But there seemed to be a roadblock in her throat suppressing all her desperate confessions, and every time she opened her mouth to speak, she found an involuntary silence come out instead.

"Come on, come on, let's sit down," Daniel said, ushering her into the living room and sitting her down on the couch. "Now tell me what's going on."

Cami opened her mouth to speak, but nothing would come out. She willed the words to come to her lips, she willed for herself to just start talking, to start anywhere, to just start somewhere so that she could get the ball rolling and then maybe get to the truth.

"Cami?" Daniel said, looking at her concernedly.

Lowering her eyes, she still couldn't say anything. She didn't know where to start. _Start anywhere,_ she tried to convince herself, _just start talking. Start explaining. Start something, please._ And still nothing came out.

"Cami, please tell me what's going on."

Her mouth opened again, but still it felt like there was something blockading her throat, or that someone had severed her vocal cords.

"Cami, what's going on? Where have you been? You're scaring me, please just—"

"I cheated," she said. It just came out, blurted with no context, no explanation. She had hoped there could have been more build up, where she could have explained how she'd been feeling so terribly depressed lately and that she had been so desperate for a fleeting second of happiness that she had thrown away their relationship. But she didn't want to justify this, she didn't want to try to make this seem more understandable or excusable. She had cheated, there was no way around it.

Daniel sat back on the couch, his eyes widening, his face slack with a blank shock. The way he said, "What?" indicated that he had clearly heard her, but could not process her words into making any sense.

"I cheated. At the party," Cami said, her voice shaking. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled over with ease, and soon she was sobbing. "I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry," she babbled over and over again.

She was watching Daniel closely, struggling to clear her vision through all the falling tears. He sat there rigidly, still trying to process the information. His eyes were welling up now, and she heard him softly say, "Why?"

Cami thought about this as she kept crying and apologizing. And she could think of all these reasons— loneliness, the creeping numbness and desperation to feel something, her overwhelming connection to Klaus, her disconnect from Daniel— but none of them were viable excuses for the terrible deed she had done. So she just said, "I don't know."

"I don't accept that," Daniel said, his tears flowing freely now, his jaw clenched. "I don't accept that. There's got to be a reason."

"Would it help you for there to be a reason? Would it make it easier on you? Because I can't think of a single reason that can justify what I did other than I'm deeply, deeply f*cked up. And I need help for that, I'm starting to realize that," Cami said, her voice breathing. "So I don't want to sit here and try to come up with excuses for what I did when really, when it comes down to it, there isn't anything I can say to make up for this monumental mistake that I've made."

They stared at each other for a long moment, both in tears. After a minute, Cami stood. "So I think I will keep packing my things, and I will go. And I want you to know that I will regret this for the rest of my life, I will always regret how…" she paused to let out a choked sob, "…how badly I've hurt you. I am so truly, deeply sorry."

With that, she went back into the bedroom that they had shared, grabbed her remaining possessions, and stuffed them into the suitcase. As she slung the bag over her shoulder, she walked towards the door, her hand turning the knob. She looked back at Daniel for a long moment, both of them still crying, hoping desperately that he might say something to her. She hoped he would try to stop her, tell her he forgave her or that he understood why she had done it, or that at least he would say goodbye or tell her he loved her one last time. But he said nothing, and she stepped out the door.

The whole way back to her sister's house, Cami was crying hysterically. She cried so hard that she hyperventilated, shaking, feeling like she might pass out. As soon as they were in the house, Cami was running for the bathroom once more, throwing up just as she had before they had left.

Margaret sat beside her on the bathroom floor again. "I'm proud of you for telling the truth," she said quietly. "It needed to be done."

Cami wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Please don't give me any bullsh*t platitudes right now," she said, her voice raw and scratchy from crying. "I don't want to feel better, I don't want to distance myself from this." The truth was that she would have given anything and everything she had to be able to distance herself from what she'd done, but she knew it wasn't right. She knew that even though the pain and shame was almost completely obliterating her, she needed to sit there and endure it because it's what she deserved. Cami knew that doing it this was the only way to have any hope of moving forward.


	6. Chapter 6

_It's done then,_ she thought. _It's done. Done and over. It's over. It's really over._ These thoughts played over and over in her head, drowning out any thoughts of anything else.

For the past three days, these thoughts were clouding her mind any time she wasn't asleep. She had taken up residence in the guest room at Margaret's house, and was so far making good use of it by sleeping for almost twenty hours a day. Any time she would wake up, she would flip on the TV, put on something insipid, and then be asleep once again within twenty minutes. Margaret would come in every hour or so to check on her, but would always find her sister out cold.

Margaret had begun to worry about Cami's increasingly catatonic state, but when she consulted her wife Katherine, she was told that this was normal. "Think of what she's been through," Katherine said, holding Margaret close and smoothing her hair. "She's been depressed for months, unable to express herself properly, feeling trapped in her own life. And in a moment of desperation, she acted out— she cheated, she quit her job, she had to move out of her apartment. Her life is totally upended."

Margaret looked at her wife skeptically, still not convinced that Cami was coping about as well as could be expected. "Let's let her rest," Katherine said. "Let her rest for a while, she's exhausted. In a few days, she'll start improving. Then we can start talking about getting her help and treatment." Katherine kissed the top of her head. "Let's go make dinner."

They began cooking, both knowing quite well that Cami would probably not have any, despite it being her favorite meal of polenta with cheese and vegetables. When the food was ready, Katherine went upstairs, walking to the guest room. Cami, as usual, was asleep. Katherine smoothed her hand over Cami's hair gently before resting her hand on Cami's shoulder, shaking her lightly.

"Camille?"

Cami made no indication that she had heard, or that she was awake. "Camille? It's time for dinner. Are you hungry? Do you think you could eat something?"

After a few seconds, Cami stirred, but it was only to roll over and turn her back to Katherine. Katherine put her hands on Cami's shoulders again and pulled her over to the side of the bed as gently as she could. Margaret had come up the stairs to check on her wife, and her sister, only to see that the progress was slow going.

"Help me get her up," Katherine said.

"If she doesn't want to go, we shouldn't make her," Margaret said.

Katherine looked sternly at her wife. "She hasn't eaten in three days. She hasn't gotten out of bed except to go to the bathroom in three days."

She turned her attention now to Cami, speaking loudly. "Cami, if you just have a couple bites to eat, we'll let you go back to sleep. I'll even bring your plate up here," she said. "Do you think you can do that? I really want you to eat something. We're both worried that you won't eat something, and we want you to eat because we love you."

"Don't patronize her, she knows we love her," Margaret hissed.

"I know she knows that, but people with depression often have delusional thinking that tells them the people who care about them don't really care, and only see them as a burden."

The two women bickered as they went down the stairs. "So you don't need to be so heavy-handed when you're trying to validate her and reassure her that we care," Margaret said. "That's all I'm saying."

"I'm just trying to help. She's my family too, you know. It's painful to see her like this. I'm trying to help, I don't know what else to do."

"There's not much else to do but just keep letting her know we're here for her."

"And is that not what I was just doing?" Katherine said as they walked into the kitchen. She scooped a small amount of the polenta into a bowl, taking a napkin with her as she headed back up the stairs, her wife following her.

"I'm just trying to say that if you're going to be so heavy-handed about it, she might see it as disingenuous and start to resent us."

"You're being paranoid," Katherine said. Halfway up the staircase, she stopped short and turned around, Margaret bumping into her. "Let's just try to be a team about this. Let's keep showing her love and support—in whatever way we see fit. She needs us right now, we're her family, and she needs help. Okay?"

"Okay," Margaret agreed, brushing the hair out of Katherine's face. She stretched on her tiptoes to kiss Katherine before smiling. "Sorry, I didn't mean to make such a big deal of it. I'm just…stressed."

"We both are, sweetheart. It's going to be hard for a little while. But we've got to be there for her, and we're going to make sure she gets better. That's what family is for," Katherine said.

They both continued up the stairs into the guest room, where Katherine sat on the far edge of the bed, Margaret standing over her shoulder. "Cami, I brought your favorite," she said. "It's polenta. Can you sit up? You only have to eat a few bites."

Cami's eyes fluttered open, and she gave her sister-in-law the first clear-eyed stare she'd given in days. All the other times she'd looked at Katherine or Margaret, it had been through a haze where it seemed like she didn't know them.

"Can you sit up?" Katherine said again. Cami made no move to sit up, no nod or indication that she would be able to do as she was asked. After a few seconds, Katherine scooped a small amount of the mush-like food onto a spoon, bringing it close to Cami's mouth.

Cami's first thought was that she wasn't hungry. Then she thought of how pathetic she must be, she couldn't even feed herself. Nevertheless, she opened her mouth to accept the small bite of food, willing herself to swallow. She fought the immediate urge to gag, to be rid of the food, but she concentrated hard on keeping it down.

She mumbled something barely audible, and was surprised to find her voice hoarse from disuse and lack of water. Trying to remember when she'd last had any water to drink, she recalled that her sister had left a glass of water for her to drink yesterday on the nightstand. It sat untouched in the same place that Margaret had left it for her, and she picked up the full glass and took a long drink.

"What did you say?" Katherine said, the spoon poised with another bite of polenta to feed to Cami. "It tastes like ash?"

Cami coughed as she swallowed another gulp of water. "No, I said it tastes like a**."

Katherine laughed in spite of herself, but Margaret scowled. "You know, we spent a long time cooking this specially for you," she said.

Her wife elbowed her in the ribs. "Don't make her feel bad," Katherine said. "She made a funny joke."

Katherine moved the spoon closer to Cami's mouth as she sat up properly in bed to make it easier for the food and water to go down. As the spoon got close enough for Cami to eat the waiting food, she grimaced. "Do I have to?" she said quietly.

"Just three more bites after this one, please," Katherine said. "You haven't eaten in over three days. Just a little more, please. And then you can go back to sleep."

Cami reluctantly took another spoonful of the polenta. "See, that's not so bad," Katherine said.

"Would you feel up to doing something later? Maybe we could go for a walk around the block in the evening?" Margaret said. Her wife shot her a withering look that said _Don't push things, she's already accomplishing enough just by eating._

"No, I'm not…I'm not…" Cami struggled to find the words. It was as if all the words she had in her mind, her entire vocabulary was stuck behind a locked door, and she didn't have access to the key. The words just wouldn't come to her.

"It's okay," Katherine said, filling in for her. "You're probably not feeling up to it."

Cami nodded her head in agreement as Katherine prompted her with another bite of food. _Only two more after this bite, and then they will leave me alone._

But even those last two bites were torturous to her. Her stomach was turning against her quickly, roiling, threatening to expel the minuscule amount of food it had just been given. And then the guilt made her feel even more ill, the guilt from feeling like she was such a burden to her family. They literally were spoon feeding her like a baby, and she couldn't even muster five bites. She was so ungrateful, such a pathetic excuse for a human, she felt so disgusting.

Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled over easily.

"Camille?" Margaret said.

And before she knew it, before she could explain herself, she was sobbing uncontrollably. Both Margaret and Katherine looked extremely alarmed, startled at this sudden outburst, but Cami was too choked up to say anything. She didn't know how to explain how overwhelmed she felt, how lost was, how she felt like her own body and mind had turned against her and that she wasn't sure if she could ever undo that. It hit her that if she couldn't ever fix this and how she was feeling, that she would be a burden to her sister and Katherine forever, and that made her cry even harder.

"Oh, Cami," they both said in hushed tones, Margaret climbing onto the bed with them so she and Katherine could both hold Cami. They clutched her to them as she cried. They allowed to let it all out, to cry and cry until the sobs dissipated into a quiet weeping, and then into an occasional sniffle and wayward tear.

Cami felt hollowed out now, as if someone had taken a spoon and scooped out everything inside, leaving a vast nothingness. She wasn't sure if she preferred this numbness to the constant swirl of emotions that had previously overwhelmed her. Because when she was devoid of feelings like this, she felt even less human, even more of an alien in this environment. It frightened her to feel so numb.

Her sister smoothed Cami's hair out of her face, taking a tissue and dabbing away some of the tear tracks that had stained Cami's face. "What can we do, Cami? Is there anything we can do to help?" she said, knowing full well that Cami might say that there was nothing Margaret or Katherine could do.

"I…" Cami said, her voice feeling foreign as the words left her mouth. "I want to take a bath."

In the tub, Cami had the desperate urge to smoke a cigarette. She wasn't a smoker, never had been except for a few times in college when she had been extremely drunk. But something about being in the bathtub, almost in complete darkness except for a few candles lit around the rim, made a craving stir within her. It just fit the scene, she felt. And besides, with how she'd been feeling lately, with everything that had been going on, she had the compulsion to do something self destructive. But then she remembered the other night at the country club, the same compulsion brewing within her, and the perfectly willing stranger— Klaus Mikaelson— who had helped her commit a self destructive deed, and she was reminded that considering that that impulse was part of what got her into such a mess, it was probably best to not act on every impulsive thought that entered her head.

She had been in the bathtub for at least two and a half hours, had been in there for so long that Katherine had knocked on the door to check on her three times. "Cami, you still doing okay in there?" she had said.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Cami had said each time.

"Do you need anything?"

"No. Thanks," she had added hastily.

After she had been crying so hard in the guest room, an idea had come to her. She wanted to be clean. She wanted to be clean more than anything. She wanted to scrub away her sins, soak away her problems, sit in a body of water for so long that she just might dissolve into a million little particles and float away. So when her sister asked if there was anything they could do to help her, she told them what she needed.

It had been difficult for her to get up, she was so weak from lack of food and water, and her legs shook with the effort. Margaret had draped Cami's arm over her shoulder for support, while Katherine walked on Cami's other side with her arm hooked through hers. Together, they had slowly made their way out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom, pausing every few steps to give Cami a rest.

By the time they had gotten to the bathroom, Cami was already exhausted and had half a mind to turn around and go back to bed. But, she had reasoned, there would be plenty of time to rest once she got in the warm water. Her sister and Katherine were going to let her use their bathtub in the master bath because it was bigger and had jacuzzi jets if she wanted. Cami really wouldn't have minded using the guest bathroom, but she felt she would seem ungrateful if she were to refuse the offer of their bathroom.

Once they had arrived in the master bath, Katherine and Margaret had nodded at each other conspiratorially, and then Katherine had left, leaving Cami alone with her sister. Margaret had looked Cami over, and Cami was sure that she looked absolutely terrible. She had been sure that Margaret was pleased that at least Cami would be bathing, because she was sure she didn't smell particularly nice.

"Alright, sister, here's the deal," Margaret had said, and Cami had looked up at her expectantly. She had sat Cami down on the edge of the tub so that Cami didn't waste any extra energy that she didn't have by standing. "I bet you're going to need some help undressing, so it's best if you don't put up a fuss about it so we can just get that over with, get you in the tub, and then you can have some alone time. Deal?"

Cami hadn't particularly wanted to have help undressing herself, but she also hadn't been able to deny that she needed it. So she had just nodded, agreeing at the very least that when it came to her sister, it really was best if Cami didn't put up a fuss and just went along with it.

Margaret had undressed her quickly and efficiently, helping Cami carefully step into the bathtub as she turned on the warm water tap. Picking up a glass jar from the vanity counter, Margaret had brought it over to Cami. "This is bubble bath, and it smells amazing," she had said. She had gotten the feeling that Cami was appreciative, but also wanted Margaret to leave. "Alright, I'll leave you to it, then. Shout if you need anything, but we'll also be by to check on you in a little bit. Is it…is it okay if we keep the door unlocked in case…in case there's an emergency?" Margaret had asked, and it had seemed as if there was a lump in her throat as she said the last word.

Cami had simply nodded, understanding what her sister meant. She was scaring her sister, she knew, but she didn't know how to explain that she would be alright even though overall everything was going wrong.

Margaret has scooped up Cami's dirty clothes to be added to the laundry to be done that night, and had left her in peace.

Cami found herself there now, two and a half hours later, her skin now profoundly wrinkled and pruny. The candles and bubble bath had filled her nostrils with beautiful scents, and she felt like she could just stay here in the warm water for forever. If she closed her eyes and lost herself for a minute, she could imagine herself as a mermaid, and she let herself get carried away with the fantasy.

She pictured herself in the sea, the adventures she could go on, the freedom she could feel. Mermaids didn't have douchebag bosses, or unrealistic deadlines; mermaids didn't even have jobs in the first place. They could go wherever they wanted, do whatever they pleased, no responsibilities to hold them down.

Off in the distance of this dream vision, she saw another mer-figure, and as she swam closer, she realized it was a merman. In the murky, dark water, it was hard to make out his features. It wasn't until she was only a few feet away from him, and he was taking her into his arms and kissing her that she realized with a start that it was the man from the other night. Klaus Mikaelson.

Cami gasped loudly, sitting up so violently that water sloshed over the side of the tub and onto the tile floor.

"Cami?" Katherine called from where she'd been sitting in her bedroom watching TV. "Are you alright?"

"Y-yes," she said. "I think I'm ready to get out now. I need some help."

"Okay," Katherine said. "Is it alright if I come help you, or do you want Margaret?"

"It doesn't matter," Cami said, her voice shaking. She just needed to get out of there, to get dried off and hopefully go right to sleep so that she wouldn't have to be awake and thinking anymore. The vision had frightened her; she didn't want to think about Klaus Mikaelson and all that she had ruined with her tryst with him.

Katherine came in a few seconds later with a warm, fluffy towel. She helped Cami stand, wrapping the towel around her. She took a smaller towel off the vanity counter and wrapped Cami's hair in it, wringing out the extra water. "Sit tight, I'll get some clothes for you," Katherine said as she sat her sister-in-law down on the edge of the tub. A few seconds later, she was back with a pile of clean pajamas, helping Cami step into each garment carefully.

Getting Cami back to the guest room was an easier affair than getting her to the bathroom had been. Cami felt recharged, if only very slightly, from the bath and from the small amount of food that she'd eaten, and it made her legs less wobbly. Once back in the guest room, Margaret joined her wife as they tucked Cami into bed, both placing a kiss on her cheek. "We'll see you in the morning," Katherine said. "Just shout if you need anything, any time. Don't worry about waking us. Just let us know, okay?"

Cami nodded weakly, hoping that once they left, she would be able to fall asleep soon. Sure enough she did. But her dreams were much the same as the fantasy visions she had concocted in the bathtub. She was once again a mermaid, free and wild, almost happy. But over and over again, no matter where she went, the dream looped infinitely, always ending with her falling into the arms of Klaus Mikaelson.


	7. Chapter 7

"She's been like this for ten days now, Kath, I don't know…I don't know how long we can sustain this."

"Ten days is nothing," Katherine said.

"Nothing? Nothing?" her wife said incredulously. "Ten days of being completely catatonic is not nothing. She doesn't do anything except to get up and sit in the bathtub for three hours. She can't feed herself, she can't dress or undress herself, she can barely even walk by herself. We are helping as much as we can but there has to be something else. She has to go see a therapist."

"She'll never go for it, you know this," Katherine said.

"Yes, I know this," Margaret agreed.

"So what are you proposing we do?"

They were coming back from the grocery store, still bickering like they had been for the past ten days, never able to agree on exactly what was the best course of action to help Cami. It wasn't that Margaret didn't want to help her sister, it was just that she thought that Cami needed more tough love than Katherine would let her give. Kath was always such a softie about stuff like this, but Margaret thought that nothing would ever get done if Cami wasn't given a little push.

"We come up with an excuse to get her in the car, we don't tell her where we're going, we take her to a doctor. She'll need to see a therapist and a psychiatrist, it's obvious that she'll need medication," Margaret said.

"So we should just kidnap her, is that what you're saying?"

"We should just let her keep staying in bed every single day, not eating, not getting better, it that what _you're_ saying?" Margaret shot back.

Katherine rolled her eyes and took her hands off the steering wheel to throw them up in the air. "I will never win with you. Yes, she needs help, yes we need to figure out something to do, no we can't keep letting her lay around the house all day sinking deeper into her depression, but we have to be delicate about this. As soon as she feels cornered, as soon as we say something wrong, as soon as she feels like—-oh, I don't know, like she's being kidnapped— she will flee, or she will retreat further into herself, or she will do something equally as destructive and counterproductive. We have to be sensitive, Madge! This takes some serious tact. And the way you want to go about things, it'll just scare her off!"

"Well, fine. Tell me, then, Oh Wise One, please tell me if you've got any brilliant ideas, because I am all ears."

"I don't know, I haven't come up with any yet," Katherine said.

"Oh there's a surprise."

They pulled into the driveway of the house and parked the car. Katherine took off her seatbelt and turned to her wife, taking Margaret's hands in hers and looking her in the eyes. "Darling, my love. I hate fighting like this. We're going to disagree about this, I know. But the bottom line is that we both want her to get better, and we are a team. Let's just go in there and see how she's doing, and we can table this discussion for later. I will do some online research. I just am really afraid that if we put her in the car and just show up at a shrink's office without any warning, we'll scare the pants off her. There's got to be a good middle ground."

"Okay," Margaret conceded, kissing her wife's hands. "Do some googling, and we'll see what other ideas are out there." They kissed briefly before they exited the car and went inside.

To their surprise, they found Cami sitting at the dining room table, hunched over a cup of warm tea. Cami hadn't been downstairs at all since she had arrived. In fact, she hadn't been anywhere besides her room and the bathroom since she had gotten there. So Katherine and Margaret were quite startled to find her up and about. It was obvious that she had been around the kitchen, as various cupboards were open and an open box of teabags was sitting on the counter.

Margaret glanced into the living room where the TV was on, and the throw blanket was on a heap on the back of the couch. It was obvious that Cami had been the most active and mobile that she'd been in at least ten days.

"Cami?" Katherine said cautiously, stepping closer to her. Cami hadn't made eye contact or even made any acknowledgement that she knew her sister and sister-in-law were there.

To be fair, Cami really hadn't noticed that Margaret and Katherine had come in until her sister-in-law had said her name. She had been concentrating so hard on the thought that had stood out in her mind all last night, all morning, consuming her entire attention ever since it had entered her head.

All her energy had been going towards thinking of the right way to phrase this idea that had come into her mind and wouldn't leave. She had gone over hundreds of variations, calculating the thousands of possible reactions that Margaret and Katherine might have to what she needed to say.

But in the end, it just came out, slipping past her lips in a most indelicate, direct way before she could stop it. And when she was done saying it, it hung in the air with a shocked silence.

"I need help."

While her sister and sister-in-law had been out at the grocery store, Cami had sat up in bed. Although she still felt all-around horrible, like she might have a literal rain cloud hanging above her head, a sudden spark of energy had lit within her. She had spent a full half hour watching TV, a trashy reality show that she didn't really enjoy, but she had had enough clarity to follow what was going on.

Cami had noticed, too, that she enjoyed just having even this little bit of extra energy. Even though she only felt about 2% better, she had realized right then that she could not go back to being completely catatonic. Lying there all day, staring at the wall or the ceiling in the bedroom, staring at the wall or the ceiling when she was sitting in the bath, she couldn't continue to live like this.

And so she had gotten up, stood unsteadily in the doorway to the bedroom. Being out from under the bed covers had made her shiver violently, even though the house was relatively warm. She had stumbled, shuffling slowly out of her room and into Margaret's room, where she had half-heartedly searched for a sweater to put over her pajamas. She had taken the first one she found, a blue cardigan with pink peonies on it, and stuffed herself into it.

Slowly she had made her way downstairs, taking one step at a time as she went. Her legs felt like wet noodles, unstable, unwilling to support her weight or help her move. Still, she had persevered and had made it downstairs, although she was of yet unaware as to why she had come downstairs in the first place.

Continuing to shuffle, she had rummaged through all the cupboards in the kitchen, seeking tea in the hopes that it would keep her warm and help her focus her thoughts. After the tea had been made, she had sat down at the kitchen table and put her face close to the cup of steaming hot liquid, savoring the warmth against her skin.

Her thoughts had turned back to the darkness once again. But instead of wallowing in it like she had since things had reached their crisis point, she clung desperately to the tiny voice straining to be heard in her head: _I need help. This needs to stop. I can get better, things can get better._ It was the first non-hopeless thought she'd had in a long time.

"I need help," she had practiced saying aloud. She had repeated it about twenty times before Margaret and Katherine had gotten home.

When her sister and sister-in-law had gotten home, she could barely look at them. It took all the strength in her body to utter the line she had been rehearsing over and over again.

She was exhausted now, just from admitting that she was in trouble.

Margaret and Katherine stood and stared at each other for a long moment, obviously shocked, before they set their groceries down on the counter and joined Cami at the kitchen table. Margaret cleared her throat uncomfortably before saying, "Um, we were just discussing this and…we agree. How can we help? What can we do to get you help?"

Cami's energy had been completely spent at this time just from being up, from making her confession that she needed help. So she sat there in silence, continuing to stare at her rapidly cooling cup of tea.

Her sister could tell that Cami was done speaking for the time being, and that it wasn't likely to get much more out of her. "Can we take you to a therapist? Maybe even a psychiatrist to see if medication would help?"

Cami nodded silently, not making eye contact. Margaret's suggestions barely registered with her, but she knew that she was being asked a question, and that she was expected to answer.

"Okay, good," Margaret said, reaching for Katherine's hand. She reached for Cami's too, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "We're proud of you, and we love you very much. I'll make a few phone calls, and we'll see if we can get an appointment set up. We're going to get you some help, ok Cam?"

"Can I go back to bed now?" Cami said quietly, almost inaudibly.

"Sure, sweetie," Katherine said with a smile, standing and helping Cami to her feet.

For the next two days, Cami stayed in bed, not even getting up to take her bath. She just rested, trying to dredge up any remainder of the tiny spark of strength she had felt the other day. Nothing particularly came to her, but she took comfort in the thought that at least things probably couldn't get worse.

The next morning, she opened her eyes to see Katherine and Margaret standing over her, waiting for her to wake up. They kept staring nervously at each other, Katherine biting her lip before sloppily handing Cami a mug of tea. Struggling to sit up, Cami accepted the tea, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. "What's up?"

"Well, Kath and I wanted to make sure that…well the other day, with our little discussion…. when you said you needed help…" Margaret started, her words trailing.

"Yes, I remember," Cami said meekly.

"We wanted to make sure you still felt that way. That you'd still be okay with going to see a therapist," Katherine said.

Cami looked between her sister and sister-in-law, seeing how desperately they wanted her to say yes. She, in fact, hadn't changed her mind about it at all, but rather had just gone back to feeling numb about it and about everything else in general. But seeing their earnest, yearning faces reminded her that she still needed help, and if she couldn't convince herself to get help on her own account, then she should do it for them.

"Yes, I want to go."

The smiles that bloomed across their faces sent a shock of warmth through Cami's body, and she found herself smiling too, if only for a half second. Katherine and Margaret noticed the brief, fleeting grin, and that made them beam even brighter.

"Ok, wonderful," Katherine said. "I've made an appointment for you tomorrow at 3, if that's ok? The doctor said she's flexible with times if there's a different time you'd rather go."

"No, 3 is fine," Cami said. "It's not like I'm doing anything else." As she said this, she thought bitterly of her former boss Richard, and how she didn't have a job anymore, and how she had brought that upon herself.

The negative thoughts were starting to crowd into the room again, and she decided it would be better to go back to sleep than to let them take over and drown her. So she thanked Katherine and Margaret for the tea, and for making the therapy appointment, and then rolled back over, closing her eyes.

"My name is Dr. Helms. You can call me Dr. Helms, or Sheila, if you're comfortable with that."

The woman extending her hand for Cami to shake was short and squat, in her late forties with stripy hair from patchy dye jobs. Cami figured the woman was past the age of trying to impress her clients, ditching any sort of business casual attire for yoga pants, a plaid shirt, and a fleece vest.

"Do you go by Cami or Camille?" Sheila asked.

"Either," Cami said. "Mostly Cami."

"Cami it is, then."

They stared at each other uncomfortably for a few seconds as Cami got settled on an old leather sofa across from where Sheila sat in a desk chair.

"Alright, Cami," Sheila said after another few moments of awkward silence. "Your sister…Margaret? said that you've been having some trouble lately. Why don't we start with some intake questions that I have all my new clients go through, and then we'll start to get to know each other a little bit more personally?"

Cami nodded, and the doctor continued. Sheila asked all the standard questions: have you ever felt in danger of harming yourself or others, does your family have a history of mental illness, what symptoms are you experiencing. Cami tried to answer all of them as best as she could, but her energy was waning quickly, and everything in her head was getting jumbled up, taking longer for thoughts to formulate and longer still for them to leave her lips.

After the intake questions, Sheila put down her notepad where she'd been writing down Cami's responses, and looked at her for a long moment. The doctor took in her unwashed hair, her dirty sweatpants, the dark circles under her eyes, and nodded sympathetically. "Your sister said you're having a hard time. Now that we've got all the bureaucratic stuff out of the way, I want to hear what you have to say, and what your experience has been like."

"I've been having a hard time," was all she could say.

The doctor nodded again. Inside, Cami was kicking herself, her thoughts telling her that the doctor thought she was stupid because she couldn't give any elaboration. But the doctor seemed unfazed by Cami's short answer. "Would you say it started for any particular reason?"

"Not that I can think of," Cami said truthfully. In reality, there hadn't been a singular event or anything that had started her decline. She had just noticed that week after week, month after month it was the same thing as always, she felt stuck like she was going nowhere. But she also felt like things were snowballing out of control down a mountainside. And she wondered how her life could simultaneously be stagnant and a runaway trainwreck.

Sheila sat back in her chair. "I can see you thinking in there," she said. "Do you want to share the thoughts you were just having?"

Cami shook her head quietly.

"Okay," the doctor said, "That's fair. You never have to share anything with me if you're not comfortable. And I'm proud of you for asserting your independence and telling me no. It's not always easy for clients to say no to a doctor, or to admit they're uncomfortable. I'm glad that you're able to do that."

Cami looked at the floor, giving a short nod to acknowledge she heard the compliment, but still feeling uncomfortable that she had received one in the first place.

"So here's what I think," Sheila said. "Are you ready?" She raised her eyebrows at Cami, clearly expecting a response. Cami nodded for her to continue. "I think that you've got a lot of potential. I think you have the potential to do absolutely anything you set your mind to. Now here's the trouble, see: your mind is really sick right now. There's a chemical imbalance going on up there and—"

"I know what Depression is," Cami interrupted. She felt a little like she was being patronized, and she didn't like it. She certainly understood what depression was, and that she probably had it, and she didn't need to be schooled on it like a little kid.

"Right," Sheila said, the corners of her mouth dipping briefly into a frown. "I don't have an official diagnosis for you yet, but it is very likely that you have depression. In order to properly diagnose you, and see how you'd like to move forward in recovery, though, I will need to see you again and soon."

"Can I come see you every other day?" Cami asked.

"Well, I think that's a grand idea."

They agreed to meet again the day after tomorrow, same time. When Cami got out to the car, Katherine and Margaret were excitedly waiting for her to divulge the outcome of her appointment. "Soooo," Katherine said, a tinge of excitement in her voice. "How'd it go?"

"Good. I'm supposed to come back on Wednesday at 3."

"That's wonderful!" Katherine said. "So really, how was it?"

Both her sister and sister-in-law were anxiously staring at her in the backseat via the rearview mirror as they drove back to the house.

Cami felt her eyelids start to droop. Getting up, getting semi-dressed, walking downstairs, staying awake and half-alert and semi-responsive to another person's questions for a whole hour had knocked the wind out of her sails. All she could manage was, "I'm exhausted," before drifting off to sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

"I think we've been making a lot of progress," Dr. Helms said, a sincere smile of encouragement playing on her lips.

Cami did an internal eye roll. _We haven't been making progress,_ I've _been the one doing all the work,_ she thought.

It was the end of their second week of meetings, their sixth time meeting. In her previous sessions, she had already started to suss out the beginnings of when she first started to feel depressed, what factors might have made things worse, her relationship with Daniel. She hadn't yet told the doctor about the night at the country club, only mentioning it briefly when she said that she had quit her job very abruptly. Cami wasn't ready to go into the details of what happened that night, the reasons why she'd quit, what happened with Klaus Mikaelson. Somehow, she sensed that the doctor knew this but was waiting until Cami was ready to talk about it.

"If you're feeling up to it, I think we could scale our appointments down to twice a week?" the doctor proposed.

Even though it had only been two weeks, Cami had to admit that she did feel the tiniest bit better. Overall, she still felt very gloom-and-doom and not much different than when she had been semi-catatonic. But she did notice that she didn't always need a two-hour exhaustion nap after every session anymore, and that on a sunny day the week before, she had taken a short walk around Katherine and Margaret's neighborhood. When she had been outside, she had taken a moment to notice the warmth of the sun on her skin, and how even though everything still felt rather awful in general, she could still feel a tiny twinge of happiness creeping in.

"I think that would be alright with me," Cami told the doctor.

"Excellent," Dr. Helms said. "However, I do have one condition. If you do not accept these terms— and that is an option you can totally pick if you want to, by the way—- we will remain with having three sessions a week. Like I said, totally a valid option if you'd rather stay with three sessions."

"Name your terms, Dr. Sheila," Cami said somewhat impatiently.

"I want you to get a hobby. It can be anything you want. But it must get you out of Margaret's house for at least one hour of the day, and I'd like you to participate in whatever it is at least twice a week. Activity classes for the local park district are starting up in a couple weeks, so you'll have plenty of time to fill out registration forms for a class if you would be interested. In fact, I have the booklet with all the classes right here if you'd like to look through it." Dr. Helms took a rather thickly bound book off her table and handed it to Cami, who began to look through it with halfhearted interest.

"I want you to get involved with something. Learn a new skill, play a sport, get active, whatever it is that you think might hold your attention," Dr. Helms said as Cami continued to look through the booklet. "What do you think?"

Inside, Cami felt like she wanted to throw up. The thought of taking up a hobby or a sport now seemed utterly exhausting. Especially something involving physical exertion. Nevertheless, she maintained a strong poker face.

She knew why the doctor wanted her to do this: with no job, no boyfriend, no hobbies, no friends, Cami didn't exactly have many things to do or places to go. And she knew that often times one aspect of treating depression is to try to get the person involved in an activity to occupy their time, help them establish a routine, and help get them out of the house to do something constructive in the hopes of getting the person back on track to having a healthy life. Still, she was terribly afraid that she would not have the energy, or want to put in the effort into getting and maintaining a hobby.

Dr. Helms was looking at her earnestly, waiting for the answer she was hoping to hear. So Cami granted it to her: "I think that's a good idea. May I take this booklet home so I can think about which class I want to take?"

"Of course!" Dr. Helms said, delighted. "I'll have you come back on Monday and let me know, okay?"

Cami nodded as she stood, exiting the doctor's office.

In the car, her sister asked how the session went. "Dr. Helms wants me to get a hobby," Cami said in a flat tone. She really wasn't enthused with the idea, but seeing Dr. Helms' face so filled with hope and sincerity had convinced her that she should at least consider it. She really hated disappointing people.

"Well, that's not a bad idea," Margaret said. "Do you have any particular hobby that you'd want to try?"

An answer immediately came to Cami's mind, and she blurted it out before she had really thought about what she was saying. "I've always wanted to learn martial arts."

Margaret glanced away from the road for a brief moment to study Cami's face. "You're serious?"

"Apparently," Cami deadpanned.

"Well if you'd rather do something else…."

"Just let me sign up for the godd*mn class, Margaret," Cami said with a heavy sigh.

"Alright, alright, sheesh. Don't have to bite my head off or anything about it. Well we're a few streets over from the park district office if you want to go sign up right now."

"Might as well," Cami said, almost adding _Before I chicken out,_ but thankfully keeping her mouth shut.

They pulled up in front of the park district office. "Do you want me to go in with you?" Margaret said.

"I'm a big girl, I can do it myself."

"Okay," her sister said. "I'll be out here."

Fifteen minutes later, Cami emerged from the office feeling simultaneously exhilarated and terrified.

"Did you sign up for something?" Margaret said.

"Yep." And for the briefest moment, Cami cracked a smile.

On Monday night, they pulled up in front of the elementary school. "You sure you don't want me to come in there with you? I can watch your class? Or I'll just sit there and read, you won't even know I'm there," Katherine said.

"Oh my god, no," Cami said, her cheeks going red with mortification. "I'm not ten, I don't need you to be my mom." She said it lightheartedly, but still felt like she'd hurt her sister-in-law's feelings. "Let me feel out these first few classes and see how badly I'll be embarrassing myself. If the embarrassment level is lower than expected, I'll let you come later, okay?"

Katherine nodded as she pulled Cami in for a quick hug. "I'm proud of you for doing this, you know. Now go kick the other kids' butts!"

Cami exited the car, slinging a gym bag containing her new sparring gear over her shoulder.

 _Beginner karate,_ the blurb in the class booklet had said, _All ages, 7:30-9:00pm Monday nights at Peterson Elementary Gymnasium._ Cami nervously tugged at her uniform, straightening the white fabric belt tied at her waist. As she stepped in to the carpeted gym, she noticed the previous class finishing up. It looked like a group of mostly tweens and teens, all wearing purple, brown, and black belts. They moved in almost complete synchrony as an instructor barked at them, stopping occasionally to make minor adjustments on one person or another. Cami was mesmerized as she watched them move, making crisp, sharp motions, and she wondered how long it would take her to get that good.

Within a few minutes, the class of purple, brown, and black belts were dismissed. Cami set her gym bag down on the edge of the gym floor along the wall, by where others had set down their own bags. She noticed that all the students, and the instructor were barefoot, and so she instinctively removed her shoes.

"Next class, please come in," the instructor called loudly. He was an older man, ex-military looking, with a shaved head and white eyebrows that strongly reminded Cami of Mr. Clean. "When you're ready, please sit down in a row in front of me."

Cami and a few other students were the first ones there, and did as the instructor had asked. Within a few minutes, about ten others had joined, making the class about fifteen people. She glanced around at the other students, a few seeming to be around her age, several in their mid- to late- teens, a few ambiguous thirty- or forty-somethings, and two people who looked well into their sixties.

"My name is Sensei DiMarco. You are all here to learn the ancient form of martial arts called Shotokan Karate. It is a form of self defense that originates from the island of Okinawa, which is in Japan. Its aim is to be used in self defense _only,_ you should never use the things you learn here unless it is absolutely necessary in a situation in which you need to defend yourself. Is that understood?"

Everyone sitting in the line in front of Sensei DiMarco nodded their heads vigorously. "Okay good. Now I'm going to cover some ground rules. Every time I ask you a question, you should respond with 'Yes, Sensei,' is that understood?"

"Yes, Sensei," they all said in unison.

"Good," Sensei DiMarco said, his lips cracking into a smile. "A smart bunch. Okay, stand up please."

Sensei DiMarco then proceeded to teach the class the rules of etiquette, such as waiting for the previous class to be dismissed before entering the gym, bowing at the entrance of the gym before coming in, lining up to wait for roll call and then bowing to the sensei. He taught them the proper way to bow (heels together, toes slightly apart, hands straight down at your sides, eyes down, bending forward at the waist), and how to do "Ready Stance," (feet shoulder width apart, arms down and in front of you with fists clenched, showing you are ready to do a technique).

Cami had no idea their was so much to learn before they even got started on doing any techniques like punches or kicks. Sensei had taught her the proper way to stand, how to make a proper fist, how to have intense focus with her eyes as if she were staring through an invisible opponent.

When the first forty-five minutes were up, she felt almost unbearably exhausted already. Sensei had dismissed them to go take a five minute rest- and water-break, and Cami had half a mind to make up some excuse that she wasn't feeling well, and just go home. But she had already surprised herself by making it this far, and she didn't want to give up now.

"Alright, people," Sensei said. "Let's partner up. Pick anybody, introduce yourself, then go get a focus mitt from over there." Sensei pointed to the far wall of the gym, where small circular foam pads sat on the floor. Cami ran over and grabbed one, finding it was hollow through the middle so that she could easily slide it onto her hand and hold it.

When she returned to the other side of the floor, she noticed almost everyone had already partnered up except for her. Sensei looked around the room, then back at her. "What's your name?" he said.

"Cami."

"Cami," he repeated. "Why don't you partner up with this pair on the end here."

She trotted over to the last pair on the end, noticing it consisted of one of the over-sixty people, and one of the young teens.

Sensei instructed one person in the pair to put on a focus mitt, and for the other person to practice punching it with their right hand, remembering to keep their wrist straight and to work on the proper way to make a fist that they'd learned about earlier in the night.

"I'm Cami," she said, putting on a big smile in the hopes that she didn't look as exhausted as she felt. "What are your names?"

The older man in his sixties smiled back at her. "I'm Max," he said.

Both she and Max turned to look at the young teen girl. She had pristine skin, braces, and her light brown hair was piled in a ballerina bun on top of her head. "My name's Hope," she said.

 **[A/N: No, I'm not giving up on this story! I'm sorry it takes me so long to update, I know I suck haha. But stick around and keep reading it if you want cuz I'm going to try to keep it going. Besides, things are about to get very interesting now that Cami is unknowingly taking a class with Klaus Mikaelson's daughter. How will Cami react when she finds out? Will taking this class bring her once again face to face with Klaus? Like and subscribe and stay tuned...]**


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